Australian National Flag Association of Queensland
Australian National Flag Day 2009
Official Queensland Commemoration
3rd September, 2009
Commanding Officer, Navy Headquarters Southern Queensland, Commander Geoffrey Fiedler,
Aide de Camp to Assistant Commander, 1st Division, Brigadier Chris Hamilton,
RAAF Base Amberley Squadron Leader Nicole Dos Santos,
President, Australian National Flag Association, Mr Allan Pidgeon,
Inspector Peter Aitken, representing the Commissioner of Police, Bob Atkinson,
President, Queensland RSL, Mr Doug Formby,
Principal of St James' College, Mr Gerry Crookes,
Representatives of community organisations,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Students,
As is now customary in our State on all major public occasions, to assist the process of national reconciliation, I acknowledge the first peoples of Australia and the traditional custodians of the land where the city of Brisbane was settled, the Jagera and Turrbal peoples.
I am very pleased once again to be at St James' College and to be with you on Australian National Flag Day, to be part of this annual ceremony to celebrate our flag and to raise community understanding and appreciation of the significance of our chief national symbol.
I join you this afternoon directly from having presided at a meeting of the Executive Council, one of my Constitutional responsibilities as Queensland's Head of State, under our Westminster system of government. The purpose of these weekly meetings, where the Governor acts on the advice of the Executive Councillors - (who are also the Ministers of the Queensland Government) - is to give legal effect to the decisions and actions of the Government. They are very formal meetings, which follow strict procedures and protocols. These procedures may seem a little odd to some - even arcane - a legacy of history and the past, scarcely relevant for modern Australia and maybe in need of change and updating but in law and in practice, they continue to be both useful and relevant, contributing to the smooth functioning of our parliamentary democratic system; and the history that led to their adoption as part of our system also has contemporary relevance and value, conferring the weight of tradition on the process overall, investing them with greater authority and significance.
I talk of these matters because there are obvious parallels with our flag. There are some who would like to see it changed, suggesting some of its elements are anachronistic, no longer appropriate to contemporary Australia. They have every right, in our democratic system, to put forward their views and ideas; debate about these issues is a healthy thing: but as with discussion on any subject, debate needs to be well-informed and, in the case of our current flag, it is probably fair to say that not everyone in the community is fully aware of its history, of the way it was created, of the way its component parts were selected or of their significance. I believe all these factors to be highly relevant for any discussion about the flag.
That is why this Flag Day is so important: it is not just an occasion to honour and pay respect to our national symbol - important as that is - it is an opportunity to tell people its story - which is a fascinating and unusual one - in fact, it is unique.
We've been reminded that our flag is 108 years old - that date linked, of course, to the act of Federation, to the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1st January, 1901. In April that year, the Commonwealth Government announced a Federal flag design competition. The idea of holding an open public competition to choose a country's national symbol was unprecedented - we were the first country in the world ever to do so. Interestingly, the new government had intended that a committee of politicians would choose the flag, but an early demonstration of ‘people power' meant that this plan was abandoned - so from the very beginning, the people were involved.
The Australian people responded eagerly to the invitation to ‘have a go', with the contest attracting 32,823 entries from men, women and children. An expert panel of judges assessed the entries, using guidelines which included history, heraldry, distinctiveness, utility and cost of manufacture - always very practical, we Australians!
Interestingly, also, the entries - at the point of judging - were anonymous, so that there could be no suggestion of favouritism.
As you might expect, the entries were highly diverse and some very colourful indeed: one depicted our native fauna playing cricket with a winged cricket ball; another had a kangaroo leaping through the constellation of the Southern Cross; another featured a kangaroo with six tails, each tail representing one of the States and yet another had a kangaroo aiming a gun at the Southern Cross!
In September, 1901, all 32,000+ entries were displayed at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne for examination by the public and the judges. It took eight weeks to set them all up and six days for the judges to decide on the winners.
When they had done so, the Prime Minister of the day, Sir Edmund Barton, announced that five entrants, who had submitted similar designs, were to share the honour of being declared the designers of Australia's own flag. They were an interesting mix: a 14 year old schoolboy from Melbourne (Ivor Evans), a teenager apprentice from Sydney (Leslie John Hawkins), a Melbourne architect (Egbert John Nuttall), a woman artist from Perth (Annie Dorrington), and a ship's officer from Auckland New Zealand, (William Stevens).
The five winners received 40 pounds each, a small fortune at the time, nearly equivalent to the annual wage for an average worker.
The winning design, as we all know, displays a group of stars on a blue background, with the Union Jack in the left corner. The five designers believed that to represent truly the sentiment of the Australian people, the national flag needed to consist of a combination of "stars and crosses", namely the Southern Cross, the Commonwealth Star and the Union Jack, itself a combination of the crosses of St George, St Patrick and St Andrew.
All the elements were highly symbolic: the five stars of the constellation of the Southern Cross represented our geographical position in the Southern hemisphere; the Commonwealth or Federation Star, with its six points, represented the unity of the six Australian states (the seventh point, representing all Australia's Federal territories collectively, was added in 1908 - and there has been no alteration to the flag since that time); the combined crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick represented Australia's early settlers and also, it was suggested, the principles on which our nation is based - of parliamentary democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech.
There were other layers of meaning also - with the design meant to represent past, present and future. The past was the acknowledgement of European settlement and the role Britain in particular had played in this; the present was the Southern Cross; and the future, the Commonwealth or Federation "Star".
There was also recognition of the significance of stars and of the Southern Cross in particular, for indigenous Australians and in Aboriginal mythology. That mythology - which we in Queensland can still see today vividly in the legends and contemporary art of the peoples of the Torres Strait also - has woven countless stories around the heavenly bodies and their origin. For the Kanda peoples of south western NSW, near the border of NSW and Victoria, the Southern Cross evokes the legend of Mululu, the leader of the Kanda tribe. Mululu had four daughters of whom he was very fond, but he had no son. When he grew old and was expecting to die soon, he called his daughters together to discuss their future. Concerned that they had no brother to protect them from the spites and jealousies of other women or from being forced into marriage with a man whom they disliked, he said he wanted them to leave earth when he died and to meet him in the sky. They could do this with the help of the spirits of the night and a very clever medicine man, Conduk, a man he described to them as having a long, thick beard. When their father died, the girls set out to find Conduk ... and after a long journey to the north, they did, recognising him by his long beard. Resting beside his camp was a huge pile of silver-grey rope, which he had plaited from his beard. One end of the rope reached up into the sky. Initially terrified to learn that the rope was their only means of reaching their father, with the guidance and encouragement of Conduk, the girls eventually climbed to the top of the rope where they found their father waiting for them. Now the daughters are the four bright stars of the Southern Cross and nearby, caring for them, is their father, the bright star Centaurus. This is my favourite story of the Southern Cross, but there are others: to the Anangu people of central Australia, for example, the Southern Cross represents the footprint of a mighty eagle that they know as Waluwaru.
So you see, ladies and gentlemen, students, what a rich treasure of meaning and symbolism is woven into our flag; how its seemingly simple elements blend past and present, the ancient, the mythical and the modern; and also what a remarkable story surrounds its creation. It is a story that from the very beginning has asserted our distinctive Australian identity, not merely, as one might have expected, in the physical design and visual appearance of the flag, but in the very way it was conceived - through a novel competition, a democratic and inclusive process that made it truly the people's flag. And so it has remained, through the 108 years it has been our formal national symbol - a flag of and for all Australians - under which we are able to unite and come together, feeling as one nation and one people, in times of sorrow and of celebration. And significantly, there is no means of changing this, other than by decision of the people. In 1998, a Flags Amendments Bill, to the Flags Act 1953, was passed, stipulating that the Australian National Flag can only be changed if the Australian electorate approves, effectively placing ownership of the flag in the hands of the Australian people.
On this Australian National Flag Day - a day we have celebrated since 1996 - it is good to be reminded of these things, to reflect on their significance and to think about what our flag means and represents, to individual Australians and to the nation.
I thank the Australian National Flag Association and its representatives here in Queensland for assisting this process of reflection; and St James College for agreeing to be the venue for this year's Official Queensland Commemoration of National Flag Day. Recalling those two teenagers who competed among the 32,000+ entrants and emerged as two of the five successful winners and designers of our flag, it somehow seems especially appropriate that this ceremony be held in a school, with young Australians present and involved. So I thank our students for their participation and hope that, following today's commemoration, when you see our flag flying, you might remember some of its interesting history and appreciate, in different ways than before, just what it represents for all the people of Australia.